Kill all the leaders, kill the elite. They are the ones who cause it.
Chinggis Khan is associated with brutality, a racist notion, especially out of Europe. And which finger do you have the right to cut off?
Even though he was not a Muslim, he protected the rights of Muslim tribes. Almost every princess of the Mongols had a Muslim partner. When you go up against a country of hundreds of millions of people, you may conquer them, but you're not going to rule them. How on earth can you rule them when you have so few people? His mother was kidnapped. His wife was kidnapped. In many ways, we are more barbaric today than he was in his time.
Religious freedom, merit over birth, and powerful women. You probably don't associate any of that with Chinggis Khan, do you? World-renowned historian Jack Weatherford explains in this interview why you should. Professor Weatherford, it's great to have you here.
Even today, one of the most common portrayals of Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Empire, especially in Europe or in the Middle East, is associated with destruction, with brutality, calamity. Even though some historical evidence does not fully support this image. But so why did this perception persist?
Yeah. Well, I think usually when a people lose a war, it's very hard to glorify that leader unless you're connected to that leader. So then we had people such as Amir Timur who claimed a close connection to the family through both marriage and through his own clan. And so those people greatly protected the image of Chinggis Khan, whereas the more settled people and the scholars mostly come out of cities and settled people. They're not people of the steppe.
But what I find the most interesting is, yes, the dominant vision of him was quite negative, but from the beginning there were great writers who respected him very much. I mentioned already the Persian writer Juvayni, who had actually lived in Mongolia during part of that time as a child with his father. So he had seen a lot up close and he followed the Mongol history very closely. He himself was Sunni Muslim and he succeeded very greatly under the Mongols. So we have, and he wrote the book about the great Chinggis Khan, the biography, and also of his descendants in Central Asia.
But the first writer of the English language going back to 1300, the first writer was Geoffrey Chaucer. Nobody really thinks about it, but one of his stories in his book was about Chinggis Khan. It was a fantasy. It was a fantasy, but he said he was the greatest lord who ever lived. It was a positive fantasy and it was all about marriage and missing rings and things like that. All magical stuff. But he used the name because it carried a lot of magic of its own, you know. And so he had used it, then things changed a little bit in the 1600s.
We had a woman and she was a French Protestant, a Huguenot. And the king forced all Huguenots to convert to Catholicism or be killed. And many, many, many were killed. But she fled the country and she fled to the Netherlands and she worked as a servant, teaching children, as a tutor and a nanny to the children.
But she wrote a book called Zingis in which she said he was the greatest lord whose only vice was too much virtue. And I think the reason, I cannot say, but I think the reason that she was so much in admiration of Chinggis Khan was because she had suffered religious persecution. She had lost everything in her life for her religion and here was a man who centuries earlier had protected the rights of all religion.
So it became somewhat popular. Then soon after, by the way, Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington, the founder of the United States, she bought a copy of the book. She gave it to her husband, George Washington. It is still in their home, but I have no evidence she ever read it. Unfortunately, a lot of husbands get books from their wives and they don't read them. So I can't say that he did. But there was an interesting connection even to my own country.
The book Zingis was very popular in many different languages. It was French and Dutch and Polish and German. It's just everything. But it inspired a great scholar in French to do a really good biography. His name was Petis de la Croix. He had been a diplomat in Turkey. He understood something about the Muslim world. He knew about the Persian chronicles. He brought all that back and he wrote an extremely good, very long book called Chinggis Khan the Great. And that introduced Chinggis Khan as a great hero. There was no question in his book. It was a great hero.
The book was very popular in America. Benjamin Franklin sold the book. Benjamin Franklin, you know, he was a printer and he ran a post office and it's like the early version of Amazon. You could order a book and he would send it to you. But so he was a big seller of the book. But the biggest buyer was Thomas Jefferson. He brought several copies, one of which is still in the Library of Congress today, the original collection. One is in the University of Virginia. He gave one to his granddaughter. So we have these copies and his words about so many people found inspiration in the life of Chinggis Khan.
But I think the change back away from that was in the Enlightenment. Voltaire wrote a play and it was actually a play produced during the Mongol dynasty originally, but he changed it a little bit and called it The Orphan of China, in which Chinggis Khan is the barbarian who doesn't know how to appreciate the civilization that he has conquered. And the reason he used Chinggis Khan, it wasn't because of Chinggis Khan, it was because he was afraid. The coward that Voltaire was, he was afraid to criticize the king directly, so rather than criticize his own king, he would set the story way off in a distant land with Chinggis Khan. That turned the attitude somewhat negative.
And I will say that also the rise of Napoleon turned the attitude towards conquerors somewhat negative. Even in his later life, Thomas Jefferson stopped mentioning Chinggis Khan. He mentioned him a lot early on. And I think the 19th century was one of the worst centuries for scholarship and for writing about Chinggis Khan. In the 20th century then we had others come along such as Nikolai Trubetskoy, later Louis Hambis and others who began, but they weren't being heard. I think in this century people are ready to hear another version.
What family was Temujin born into?
The family of Temujin was extremely unimportant. They were just a very small group of people. Even on the steppe where there was a fair amount of poverty, they lived on the edge of all of that. They lived at the edge of a steppe and a mountain area. And so it's not clear that they were really even herding very many animals early on. Hunting was also an important part of their life. They were not a part of the steppe aristocracy, the old clans that had been ruling through various generations and empires. So he was born into a relatively obscure family in almost every way.
Some books say that, oh, his father was a khan and Temujin wanted to reclaim it. No, no, even his father, Yesugei, we call him Yesu. He was a hero and a warrior, but he was never a khan, never an important person.
The reason I'm asking this question is I'm trying to understand what aspect of his genealogy allowed him to claim the legitimacy to rule over these Mongol and Turk tribes.
It was not the legitimacy of his genealogy that gave him the power to rule. It was the legitimacy of heaven that granted him the power to rule. That's what he claimed. And he made no pretense. He had some khans in his ancestry, but they weren't particularly important even on the steppe, but he was not destined to inherit that and he never made much out of it.
Part of the reason is because at a very young age his father was killed, and when his father was killed, all of his father's brothers and cousins and all of the relatives, they threw mother Hoelun and also Guahtsai, the two wives of Yesugei, they threw them out. And between them they had, her seven children, the two women, they threw them out to die. So he was deserted by his own family, his own clan turned against him, the relatives of his father. And they said that to his mother, you know, you are not one that we have to call when it's time to eat. You're not one that we have to respect. So he had no claim.
And throughout his life, he turned that into an advantage. He found people, strangers often, who would become loyal to him through his own charisma. So it was his own power that created him, his own power and his own relatives. He never trusted them.
The Secret History of the Mongols is the only written source about Chinggis Khan written shortly after his death. So how does this text describe his character and how much can we trust it?
Yes. Okay. For me, the Secret History of the Mongols is one of the most important documents in history. I think it's very clear when we study it that the earlier part before Chinggis is mostly based upon myth about the blue-gray wolf and the tawny brown deer. Maybe that was the name of an ancestor or just a totem. It's unclear, but you read the Secret History and you know, and then you get to the life of Chinggis Khan and it begins to pick up in a very realistic way with huge parts missing.
It was censored later. I think during the Ming dynasty, the Chinese, I believe, but it could have been as early as the time of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Chinggis. Great sections were cut out. A few changes were added, sections were removed, but overall I believe the story and I believe that it was written by Shigi Khutukhtu, a Tatar who was adopted. You know, Chinggis in his early days, he adopted one orphan from every conquered people. And Shigi Khutukhtu was the first actually.
And so we have when the author of the Secret History is speaking, he refers to mother Hoelun as mother. And then he has conversations from inside the ger, the yurt. And so it's obvious that he was a person who was there. When he gets to the war part, Shigi Khutukhtu is not very clear. He wasn't a good soldier. He had a few episodes, Chinggis tried to train him. And so the war parts are not very clear. And then when it gets to distant places like the siege of Baghdad, well, they knew nothing about the siege of Baghdad. So you have to judge it carefully. What's right there about Chinggis Khan, his life, his personality, his actions. Mostly I trust it. There are one or two exceptions, but mostly I trust that part.
Before Chinggis Khan, the Mongol and Turkic tribes had been fighting each other for generations. What exactly did he do to stop this endless intertribal warfare?
Yes, tribal and clan warfare had been going on for probably thousands of years. Sometimes an empire would rise for a while, it would fall. Sometimes there was kidnapping, especially of women, or stealing of animals. Feuds would happen between clans. This was going on and on.
So Chinggis Khan and the people around him, they lived in a kind of middle area around the Onon River and also Mount Burkhan Khaldun, which was in between the Merkit tribe in the central part of Mongolia, which was a little bit more developed at that time under Toghrul, on the other side were the Tatar people between them and China. So they were wedged in there.
And then at first Chinggis Khan became allied with Toghrul, because Toghrul had helped him to rescue Borte when she had been kidnapped by the Merkits. So he owes a great deal of debt to Toghrul and also to his friend Jamukha. But what happened was Chinggis went out and conquered the people that he was told to conquer, mostly Tatars at first. He went out, he conquered them, he came back, but then he didn't get the recognition. And the next year they would fight the Tatars again. It was sort of a senseless situation for him.
So he realized he was conquering, conquering, conquering. But every time the war would come back the next year. So he made a very radical decision and that was kill the leaders. Kill all the leaders. Kill the elite. They are the ones who cause it. The common people are not causing the war. It's the elite. For the rest of his life, that was his philosophy in war. Kill the elite. Kill off the leaders of the country.
In 1206, there was a great kurultai and he was named Chinggis Khan. So, as we know, a very similar ceremony was traditionally used to elect rulers among the Turkic peoples, Turk tribes. In what ways was the great kurultai uniquely a Mongolian tradition? And in what ways was it a continuation of broader steppe tradition?
You know, some years earlier on a lake by Khentii Mountain in Mongolia, his own followers had proclaimed him as Chinggis Khan, but it was just as a small tribe. And then later when he broke with the Kereit, with Toghrul, because he wanted his son Jochi, or Josi at that time, to marry the daughter of Toghrul. Toghrul said no, and the son of Toghrul said basically he's not qualified to marry a princess. Chinggis Khan went and defended his son and he defeated the Merkits after that.
Now, Chinggis Khan has all these followers from his own clan, his own tribes. Some of them are with him, some still against him. He has some people from the Kereit, he has Tatars. So he put them together and he gave them a new name and that name was Mongol. And he kept the name of Chinggis Khan for himself. That was not an old title. You know, Gurkhan was a very famous title on the steppe. The great khan would be the Gurkhan, but Chinggis Khan never claimed that. He just said Chinggis Khan, Chinggis Khan, a new title.
The meaning, I mean, I can say what I think it means, but it's a little bit unclear. But I think it has, the Mongols, they liked words that had different meanings in different languages, but always good. So for one thing, it was related very close to Tengri and to the sky. And on the other hand, it sounded a lot like the Mongolian word for power and determination. So it was a very good name. And I think that had something to do with the title. I don't know that's the whole story, but I think it was related.
His great law, the Yasa of Chinggis Khan, it banned kidnapping women, the enslavement of Mongols, and theft of livestock. Where did this kind of legislation come from?
I think that all of the inspiration of Chinggis Khan came from his life experience. It was not from ideology. It was not from religion. He didn't just think up, oh yeah, I should outlaw the kidnapping of women. No, his mother was kidnapped. His wife was kidnapped. He went through that. He knew that the violation of one woman was a violation of a whole family, of a whole community. And everybody suffered from that. This is simple. It's not ideology. It's just simple common sense. And this is where most of his law came from.
And at first his laws were just for the people around him, for the Mongol people. And that was the Yasa. And then later when he began, first the Uigurs of this area came to join him. As other people joined with him, then he began to have what they called the Great Yasa, the laws that apply to everybody. And those included religious freedom, no kidnapping of women, no sale of women. All envoys and ambassadors would be protected, and then certain laws for the military, such as that each squad of ten, they had to return with every member dead or alive, they had to bring every member back.
So these were very strong laws that he made for his whole empire, but he allowed each group to keep their own law as long as it didn't contradict the Great Yasa.
But was it very different from existing legal tradition in the steppe at that time?
Yes. Most of his law within his own tribe, the Yasa, was very much the steppe law. That was clear. And then the other groups, of course, they had their own, mostly steppe law. Yes. But the issue for him in the Yasa, the first law of the Yasa of which we know, was the law of religious freedom. Okay, that's a much different law because he saw on the steppe most of the fighting was either over raiding, kidnapping of women, stealing of animals. He outlawed that.
But he saw that in so-called civilized society, people who lived in the cities, you know, that very often it was over religion of all things. And the first episode he had was when the Uigurs, the Uigur people came to him because they were Muslim and they had Guchluk was their usurper ruler at that time out of what is now Kyrgyzstan and he was ruling over them and he was persecuting Islam and they came and they said, we will surrender to you if you can protect us. He protected them. They chased down Guchluk. He ran almost all the way to Pakistan before they caught him. They caught him. They killed him. And then Chinggis Khan made the law.
Other societies, other rulers have sometimes given freedom to different religions to practice. But this was usually for the organization of religion, for the monks, for the priests, for mullahs, so on. Chinggis Khan, what he came up with was unique in all the history of the world. He said every person has the right to their own religion. No one can force them to accept another religion. No one can prevent them from accepting another religion. That was different. It wasn't protecting the monks and the priests. It was protecting the people. And that was one of the reasons he had great loyalty.
And even though he was not a Muslim, he protected the right of Muslim tribes from a very early point. Also in this area he had more animistic people with their shamans. He protected them because they were very close to his own religion. Later, of course, he also protected Christians and he protected Taoists. He protected almost every religion except the one he never understood, which was Confucianism. He wasn't sure it was a religion. He never understood what good they did for society. But he didn't persecute them.
Religious belief, I think, was very calculated. Yes. I think the one for protection of women and envoys just came out of his practical experience. But the one out of religion, in a way it's out of his practical experience, but it's really not protecting anything that's of great personal interest to him, but it makes many, many people loyal to him. So I think, yes, there was more of a political decision. Again, it's not an ideological decision like, oh, all people are children of God. He did believe that, but that's not the source of the belief.
He believed that every group of people, they had a religion and they should stick to the religion of their fathers and their mothers, and the great sky was the one ruler over everything in the world, Tengeri. But he himself did not try to change anyone's religion. His grandson Mongke, I think, expressed it very well, that the different religions of the world are like the different fingers of God, and which finger do you have the right to cut off? And I think that may have come from Chinggis Khan, but it's given to us from his grandson Mongke.
What about the beliefs of Chinggis Khan himself, the religious beliefs?
Early in life, his worship was of the sacred Burkhan Khaldun and of the sky above, the eternal blue sky. He was very concerned, and I think he was well trained about the spirits around him in the earth and in the various rivers. But his mother was not from there and his father was not there anymore. So he didn't have a lot of that training, but he had some because he interacted a lot with Urianha people, and they were the ones who I think helped to teach him about the sacred mountain.
But then the problem for him became a little bit when they got away from there. Then there are other mountains and other rivers and you didn't know how to pray to them and you didn't know their power or their value. And so it became a little bit more difficult and so gradually over time he shifted away from the mountain. It always was his personal sort of spirit and protector always. But for the empire then he began to stress the great blue sky.
The great blue sky, but also every time he uttered those words, he also said the great mother earth. People forget somehow often about the great mother earth, but he always blessed the eternal blue sky and the great mother earth.
Can we say that Islam became an inherent aspect of the Mongol Empire and its successor states?
We can say that outside of some areas. I mean, we can say that for all of Central Asia, for the Middle East, because Islam was already there in those areas. In China, he had a lot of impact with Islam because, you know, Chinggis Khan, in recognizing each religion, he recognized that each religion had something to offer. For example, he thought the Taoists were pretty good with medicine, but he thought Muslims were the best in arithmetic, mathematics, and these sciences. So he brought many, many Muslims to China to serve as engineers, to serve as administrators, tax collectors. They often, the tax collectors are hated in every country, of course, and so he brought many of them there, but that remained very much a mixed country.
And he probably in his lifetime, Chinggis Khan favored more Taoism within China over the others, but he gave all of them equal rights. And then at the time of Kublai Khan, he was able to mix in and really put one religion against another much more effectively than his grandfather had done. But certainly throughout Central Asia, Islam became the main faith of the Mongols.
Then Russia remained Christian and a few of the Mongols converted to Christianity. Now the Mongols in Mongolia, they did not convert. No, most, because today Mongolia is mostly Buddhist. There's a tendency to want to say that Chinggis Khan favored Buddhism. I don't see the evidence for that. Then they say, well, Kublai Khan favored Buddhism.
Kublai Khan's mother was Christian and he was very familiar with that tradition. He was not interested in being a Christian. He was interested in being a Mongol. And he used the religions one against the other. But certainly in Central Asia, I think what was important was when the Mongols came in, say for the Ilkhanate in Persia, in Iraq and in that area, they did give equal rights to all the different branches of Islam.
And especially at that time, Sufis were often persecuted and the Mongols liked the Sufis. There was an attachment with them. I think in part because of the more spiritual aspect of Sufism as opposed to a lot of Muslim scholars who are very scholarly and academic, they are more spiritual. So yes, Islam in Central Asia and then all into India and all became the dominant religion of the Mongols. Yes. But not Mongolia.
We know that in 1241 they reached Vienna and Europe was in panic. Why did they not advance any further?
The standard reason given was the death of Ogedei and that everybody raced back, which is true, they did race back for the kurultai. But the fact is after the kurultai they increased their warfare by invading further into China, by deeper into Central Asia, into the Middle East. They were not very interested in Europe because, in my opinion, it wasn't just because of Ogedei. They could have come back there like they did the other places. No, two things, I think.
One was a geographic and environmental factor. Mongols liked an open area to move. The horses, for example, the army moved as a great wave in two wings. And of course, when you get to these sedentary societies, you have to move on a road. Well, that was not very good for the Mongolian army. Also, you cannot cross the countryside because their crops are out there, but they also have ditches for irrigation. The land has been plowed up. It's not good for a horse. It's very difficult.
So Europe, first of all, was environmentally challenging. I would say the same way India was south of the Indus River, environmentally challenging for different reasons, but similar. So that was part of the answer. But the other is they had seen the world. They had seen China. They had seen the edge of India. They had seen Persia and Baghdad. They had seen Russia. They had seen Europe, Western Europe.
Western Europe had nothing to offer. It had no great wealth. It was nothing. It had some skills. The only skill was some in mining and metalwork. Otherwise, they had just nothing compared to the great wealth of Persia, of Baghdad, of India. These were the richest places. The Khwarezm Empire in Central Asia. The Mongols knew value. Western Europe had little value compared to all the other areas around them.
Chinggis Khan, he was known to be illiterate, but nevertheless, he adopted a writing system for the Mongolian language and built a complex administrative system. How did he manage to do this?
